“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

Invisible cities is a project taken from the homonymous novel by Italo Calvino.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

The shiny surface reflects the real space lived by the observer, overlapping the contingent reality to the work transparencies driving to a floating and overlapping effect.

Translucency emphasizes a runnig after of delocalized different and divergent shapes and colors, absorbing the surrounding reality and reflecting it in addition to its own.

These works, created in the darkroom, using chemicals on paper and emulsified polyesters, are composed of a superposition of clearly defined and signical brush strokes, to strokes that are fuzzy, spongy and smudgy, with condensation of colour which is at times coagulated, at others fluid, liquid, giving the impression of wetting one’s fingers. Alternating between clarity and evanescence, between past and present, overlapping various perspective planes rendered in two dimensions, “Four Seasons” pursues the need to go back to an original form of expression, that of a painting devoid of didactic and descriptive superstructures.

There are 4 seasons – there is the season of ideas, enthusiasm, visions and insights; the season of planning, analysis, courage and expectations; the season of work, creation, concreteness and surprise; the season of contemplation, rest, sedimentation, awareness,regeneration and connection to a new beginning – even if they are often confused or experienced simultaneously in a single fragment of time.

The status of entanglement reflects an actual and impossible separation, an intertwinement. It’s a physical phenomenon, discovered by quantum physics, where two or more subatomic particles, also known as “entities”, mutually condition themselves, but at the same time communicate among themselves.

Consequently, physical systems are strongly connected, they actually resonate with each other.
Subatomic particles are mutually correlated, so reflecting the Big Bang theory, according to which everything was connected at the beginning, but everything is still connected and inseparable now.
Humanity consists of subatomic particles, hence the “human” entanglement is a state of nature, our day-to-day behavior and human relationships actually originate from that connection.
I created a structured set of “umbilical cords”, an intertwinement of emulsified papers: these same papers were then chemically “painted” by means of chemical procedures in the darkroom.
Finally “painted” cords have been precisely embedded and sewn into each other, leading to tapestry works where painting, photography, sculpture and weaving are contained altogether.

It is a project based on the matter shaping by itself, on the eternal mutation, connection and linkage with the Whole. I folded emulsified paper realizing spirals to symbolize the DNA structure. Then I painted them in darkroom through uncontrolled chemical processes. Subsequently I unfolded them creating an other form that would bring with itself the signs (fold marks) of the starting form. Through the spiral folds, that chemicals action gave birth to a dreamlike and ancestral dimension, a kaleidoscope of antropomorphic faces, primeval and aliens, of dancing sending back to the each of us most intimate part. The individual cells arise from a common and single element, the spiral’s one, the DNA’s, in turn discomposed and divided by paper’s fold marks, arrange never stackable elements, often completly symmetrical, sometimes each other’s negative.

These works were created in my darkroom through the mixing of chemicals, and through their temperature changes, as well as water and light temperature variations on emulsified paper. This technique is based on the concept of cause and effect and on the dialectics between my action on matter and its reaction to it, but I also give vent to a high percentage of non-deterministic mechanisms. These works are narrating bright, fantastic landscapes, psychologicaldistortions, epiphanies, déjà vu, dreamlike visions, as well as flashbacks. They are undecided, imbued with light, even though they are paradoxically realized in the total absence of light.

It is a site-specific project of the lemon greenhouse, the Limonaia of Villa Saroli of the Art Museum of Lugano. The project is inspired by “One hundred years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and based on Entropy and on the cycle of life.
The space in the Limonaia is 22 metres long and 5 metres wide and along the longer wall there are large windows that one can look into from the outside to see what is inside.
One of the functions of the Museum is to preserve the work of art. Paradoxically, I wanted to create a work that does not keep through time, but, rather, will eventually disappear.
I structured a table of 15 metres with wooden boards and easles. On this table I placed fruits, vegetables, flowers, water, bread, tea and wine… and in some of the plates and glasses I put some earth, pulses and seeds.
While the food was rotting and passing to an entropic state of disorganised matter, young shoots were sprouting from the earth.
There was no vernissage for the exhibition and for two months, people could only observe the changes from the outside.
During this period I documented all the changes by taking photographs.
The decaying bodies developed micro-organisms, insects, molds, bacteria…which were scientifically analysed and noted down with their specific names, together with those of the foods, in the catalogue that was presented at the official finissage that was opened to the public. Each photograph had a code next to it to indicate the hour and the date the images had been taken.

“It is a table of the senses, where the notions of caducity and transience suggested by the decay
of the fruit are blended with the concept of rebirth offered by the fragile shoots which inhabit the plates.
Built on binary associations, between life and death, the beginning and the end, but principally on the
metamorphosis of the elements and the eternal dance of entropic disorder…”

This project is based on the theory of French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the ”lack of being”concept, which he called Béance, or gap.
According to Lacan every human being feels complete only when it is still attached to his/her mother. After the umbilical cord is cut, he/she will spend the rest of his/her life trying to fulfill that gap, that lack of completeness.
Lacan visualizes it as the texture of a fabric that has been irreparably frayed and can never be mended or healed again.
For this work, I took some emulsified papers, which I then treated with chemical processes in the darkroom, because I wanted give them the effect of a lived life. I then tore them at the edges. At the same time I created some weavings to symbolize the umbilical cords and the future relationships that every individual builds during the course of his/her lifetime.

Pleasure is a pulse which never reaches its realization, since it can be only where it cannot

Pleasure is a pulse which never reaches its realization, since it can be only where it cannot
For this project I chose two ranges that interact with each other in order to create in a visual dialectics of being, an unremitting private arousal of self satisfaction chances.
The path that sees these two starring bodies will never have a decisive point.

I dedicated this series to the Rorschach test. But in this case, the unpredictability of forms is given by the action of chemicals on emulsified paper and the ambiguous images that are created by nature.

The concept of the project for this exhibition is based on interpersonal relationships, starting from the mother-child relationship, represented by the Béance installation, passing through coupleships, represented by the photographic works of “Relationship” and “Parole tritate” (Shredded words), and then moving to unfulfilled desire in the video “Enjoyment is a tension which is never fulfilled, since it can only happen when it does not occur”, up to expectations, birth and gestation of thoughts, represented by the watercolours, drawings and sculptures; then continuing with the interpersonal relationships and contacts that are created in the piazzas (from the sculpture representing the octagonal fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome), down to the relationship of the woman in her ability to be earth, in her relationship with her body, her menstrual cycle and the universe, with the 28 “Moons” and “Womb” on watermarked paper and Nepalese paper.

Silence is an installation, that was exhibited at the 54th Biennale of Venice, in memory of the 308 victims of the earthquake of L’Aquila.
It consists in 308 bodies made with the papier-mâché technique, from newspaper clippings that talked about this catastrophe.
I modeled a body in clay, then I created a plaster mould and all the bodies were born out of this single matrix in the same way we are born of Mother Earth.
I chose a neutral colour, white, to symbolize a collective rather than an individual identity.
I chose paper because it is organic, degradable and undergoes changes in time, just like the human body.
The bodies are all facing the wall to symbolize the Earth to which they return and that gave birth to them.
The silence is the one heard after the earthquake of L’Aquila.

“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
-Khalil Gibran (The Prophet)-

It is a work on the Human Genome Project.
One of the main findings that have recently emerged is that all human races are 99.99% equal and that racial differences are genetically irrelevant.
I wanted to create a structure capable of collecting the DNA of all ethnic groups.
So I collected some hair from all over the world, by putting ads on the major social networks like Facebook.
I then wove and felted this hair on a few newly shorn sheep fleeces of wool.
I chose this support with reference to the sheep Dolly.

“The man who planted trees” is a project taken from the homonymous short story by Jean Giono. The tale reflects the relationship between man, nature and transformation, in an unconditional and boundless act of love, generosity and immutable constancy. These are the themes the research is based upon.
The tale is about a hermit that decides to dedicate all of his existence to planting acorns every day so as to give life to a wood forest as gift for future generations.
I created a paper cellular structure made of cotton paper. In each cell I put some beans, covered by cotton wool, that I watered every day till they sprouted and became plants. I then de-contextualized the cellular structure and placed it in a wood that is going through phases of deforestation.